Update on global warming!

[Cacia]

I suggest everyone stay open and not dig in like donkeys, and proceed as though global warming is real.

 

[Rainer]

Just glanced at the paper. It's been about four years since it's written, so I'd be curious to see newer models. Much of Richard Lindzen's article is directed at the difficulty faced by just such models. In my own field (I'm also at MIT), it's very hard to get around the limitations of modeling (you can only trust your model to the extent you trust your understanding of the variables and the causes that link them). The validity of the paper is tied to the validity of the model. The debate should be centered there.

 

[Rainer]

I suggest everyone stay open and not dig in like donkeys, and proceed as though global warming is real.

Just curious, but why? Have you considered that this might be worse? Don't want to suggest it is, but you MUST consider both sides. There are rationale reasons for proceeding in many different ways.

 

[Lucy's Diver]

Im hoping for that....
I just find it ironic/funny that this is a realy bad winter, nation wide, admist the frantic global warming thing. Not as funny as the global warming meeting having to be cancled, twice due to cold weather.
So my phone magicly starts working, my camera still works, sort of after getting dunked and I can now drop glasses and have them break without coming apart, sounds like pretty good luck to me!
If the models are predicting arctic cooling, why are the greenies so excited about the ice pack melting?

I don't know where you are, my chilly friend, but I haven't gone skiiing in two years due to lack of snow. The last good snowstorm where I am was 2003, and it melted in a week.
I would have thought that the deniers had fully traversed from the "global warming isn't happening at all" camp (mostly the 1990s) to the "the globe is getting warmer but we have nothing to do with it" camp, the science having become obvious (you know, simple average tempatures over the last 50 years and all that). A few people, it seems, have yet to see emporer's clothes.
You, sir, are the man on Easter Island cutting down the last tree. He probably felt pretty self righteous as well.
The latter is a historical reference, you may be well served to look it up.

 

[Wildcard]

b.s.

melting permafrost is a huge problem (and acts to further accelerate global warming)

here's another article from the homer tribune for you:

http://www.homertribune.com/archive.php?aid=342

Funny, Homer has not had pemafrost in 10,000 years. If you are going to be so anal as to not see the humor in "Alaskans in favor of global warming" you realy need to get laid.:shakehead
From today! Emergency order extending ice stud season. http://www.homertribune.com/article.php?aid=1490

 

[Wildcard]

I don't know where you are, my chilly friend, but I haven't gone skiiing in two years due to lack of snow. The last good snowstorm where I am was 2003, and it melted in a week.
I would have thought that the deniers had fully traversed from the "global warming isn't happening at all" camp (mostly the 1990s) to the "the globe is getting warmer but we have nothing to do with it" camp, the science having become obvious (you know, simple average tempatures over the last 50 years and all that). A few people, it seems, have yet to see emporer's clothes.
You, sir, are the man on Easter Island cutting down the last tree. He probably felt pretty self righteous as well.
The latter is a historical reference, you may be well served to look it up.

Welcome to the board. So this years record low temps have nothing to do with anything?..Of course the world is warming, it has been for 10,000 years. Then it will get cold again. Nothing stays the same, it's called nature! Has dumping billions of tons of crap into the air every year helped? No frikkiin way. Have you stoped using oil;/gas/propane/electricity/cars/transported goods? I didn't think so so get off your high horse, were all in this together.
I simply pointed out that it has been a cold year and all you liberals jumped all over it.

 

[lamont]

Just glanced at the paper. It's been about four years since it's written, so I'd be curious to see never models. Much of Richard Lindzen's article is directed at the difficulty faced by just such models. In my own field (I'm also at MIT), it's very hard to get around the limitations of modeling (you can only trust your model to the extent you trust your understanding of the variables and the causes that link them). The validity of the paper is tied to the validity of the model. The debate should be centered there.

Well, first of all we have to use global climate models to predict future behavior of the system. We don't have a spare Earth that we can do a full-blown test on by cranking up the CO2 levels to 500 ppm and let it run for 50 years and see what happens. We have to do computer simulations. To attack the usefulness of whole approach of climate simulation and claim that they are inherently useless due to the inherent uncertainties is to simply state that we can never know what the climate will do, we should never bother questioning what the climate will do, and we might as well go about our business as usual.

This is actually a highly non-scientific arugment to make, though, since all science inherently deals with doubt and uncertainty and nothing is known precisely, not even the laws of gravitation or quantum mechanics. Those are both merely models and it is not in any way known that those correspond to what is really happening in the universe, but their previous predictive power in the past has been very high and those models allow us to build computers and the internet, etc. For models like those which describe climate, the best that we can do is to make sure that the models themselves when run with initial conditions corresponding to past times adequately reproduce the past climate when allowed to run, and when interjecting events like the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 and ensuring that the climate model accurately models the observed post-1991 climate. In addition the models must accurately model conservation of energy and other pure physics boundary conditions.

I'd love to see a real discussion over the limitations of the models, but I've never seen anything coming from the global warming skeptic crowd other than pure skepticism over the models, which amounts to the statement that it if isn't known precisely, then it can't be known at all.

Its also very easy to do extreme models. If you dump 2000 ppm of CO2 into the atmosphere it can be computed what the temperature rise from that will be, you can also calculate the positive feedback from H2O vapor, you can show that it'll melt the polar ice caps and all the glaciers, you can compute the warming due to the change in the Earth's albedo and the warming due to melting permafrost and you can come to the unsurprising conclusion that the Earth's climate will look like it did >= 100 million years ago. If you take all the carbon which has been sequestered over the past 100 million years and release it into the atmosphere you turn the climate clock back 100 million years. We know that the threshold for dangerous anthropogenic climate shift is going to be less than that somewhere, the only question is where the level is that the climate change becomes dangerous.

So, the proof that it exists can be done. The question is of the level where anthropogenic interference becomes dangeorus. The models are useful to try to probe the exact level, but they're necessarily inaccurate because we don't have a spare Earth to test all our theories out on. Is the answer really to just ignore it all, roll the dice, and hope that everything works out okay?

 

[Rainer]

If you're insinuating that I suggested models are worthless, you're not reading very well. To suggest that the models have been very good in the past (wrt climate research), however, is nuts. Predicting weather is one of the hardest things modelers have attempted (just think about how often weathermen are wrong about tomorrow's forecast). To say we should ignore the models is ABSURD! The question (not for you, but for science) is to what degree are the current models reasonable. There seems to be real debate here. The answers are important.

 

[H2Andy]

I suggest everyone stay open and not dig in like donkeys

frag!

ok, can i dig in like a donkey if i have a permission slip?

 

[lamont]

Welcome to the board. So this years record low temps have nothing to do with anything?..Of course the world is warming, it has been for 10,000 years. Then it will get cold again. Nothing stays the same, it's called nature!

yeah, and the last time this amount of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere and the climate changed this rapidly it produced an exinction event known as the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum which killed most of the species then alive. that is an entirely 'natural' change in our past which best models the disaster we're heading towards now if we continue along business as usual.

Has dumping billions of tons of crap into the air every year helped? No frikkiin way.

we know the lifetime of CO2 in the biosphere is around 50 years and can calculate the contribution from anthropogenic sources in terms of metric tons and that is on the right order of magnitude to produce the changes observed in the keeling curve.

Have you stoped using oil;/gas/propane/electricity/cars/transported goods? I didn't think so so get off your high horse, were all in this together.

the first issue in getting over an addiction is admitting you have a problem. i can admit that i have a problem. you're still stuck denying there is anything wrong.

I simply pointed out that it has been a cold year and all you liberals jumped all over it.

i don't understand why this debate is framed in terms of liberal vs. conservative. it seems more properly framed in terms of science vs. ignorance, and i'd welcome anyone who believed in free market economics to get onto the side of science. there's no need to denounce capitalism in order to accept the science of global warming...